


The River Sings Sweet and Sour

by R3ads2MuchDouj1n



Category: Original Work
Genre: Chinese Mythology & Folklore, Gen, Occult, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-05-30 21:23:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19411669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/R3ads2MuchDouj1n/pseuds/R3ads2MuchDouj1n
Summary: A story of love, hope, and all that other crap that I don't believe in, told through an occult narrative, mixing in Chinese mythology and traditions. Full disclosure I am Not Chinese, and if I make any mistakes and offend someone I AM sorry.In that same vein, this is a story that I have wanted to tell so bear with me here.





	1. Chapter 1

The woman sat on a limestone rock, her pale hands neatly folded on her lap, her legs draped with a heavily embroidered silk dress that hung off of her frame in great red folds filled with golden fish. She faced the river which was cool and green in the summer heat; not that she could see it, her face was covered by a square of black cloth that was bound at the back of her head by a series of incredibly complicated knots. The cloth was not breathable. And in twelve hours she would be dead. Unless the knots were to come undone.

All Five hundred and Twenty of them.

They couldn't be undone, they had to fall away. All at once. On their own.

All Five hundred and Twenty. At once. Not a string out of place.

So the woman, whose name was Sue, sat perfectly still. And she wondered not for the first time, just how in the hell she had come to be here, sitting on the stone bank of the Detroit River, on a hot summer's day, wearing a lot of heavy fabric, and a thing that was going to suffocate her. She wondered very loudly to herself what madness had driven her to think this was a good idea. What diseases of the mind had twisted her to think this would work. Because that was all she could think about. She couldn't think about the river because she couldn't see it, she couldn't think about the stench of the water pumping station because the cloth was soaked in a overwhelming perfume, she couldn't think about anything but her predicament. And how she'd chosen it.

And how despite how awful, repugnant, and truly unpleasant the experience might be, in some sick, twisted way that probably indicated she needed to be medicated, she was _excited_. The prospects of this little thing working out for her were marvelous, and she couldn't wait to reap the rewards. Her suffering would be worth it, had to be worth it, she wasn't going back unless she had her prize.

She had tried to get it for so long, had scoured the city, the county, the country and beyond. She'd traveled to far off lands only to come back empty handed, no one was placing pressure on her to get it, in fact several of her more involved aunts had suggested she give up on it. But she'd been determined, and so she'd found herself seeking outside help, at first surveys and websites, scientists and psychologists, then when they suggested she throw in the metaphorical towel she had abandoned them and sought out more...exotic assistance. Palm readers in Paris, Romani wise women, Korean Mudangs, and Shinto fortune tellers. When they started uttering discouraging words she'd gone back home, not defeated. Sue was never defeated, or if she was she refused to recognize it as anything but a temporary state.

She hadn't graduated from law school by giving up. She hadn't taken over her firm by sheer will by surrendering. She didn't have three huge houses because she was a quitter. She wasn't going to let this little thing be denied to her as well. 

So she'd sought _her_ out. The woman they all whispered about but never spoke to. The old woman in black. 

She'd advised Sue to do this thing. To take this risk, as she had so often taken risks, she'd sewn her into the dress, muttering her odd little words with each stitch, and had fastened her knots, each one fastened simultaneously, each one held a prayer, or a curse, Sue didn't know which all she knew was that little old woman had assured her that if this didn't work, then she would have nothing left to worry about.

So Sue sat by the river and waited. And waited.

And waited.

The knots never came undone. But Sue still sat back straight as a ruler. And the old woman came before her and clucked her tongue. She almost felt bad for the idiot, almost. She ran her hands over the fabric, it was a lovely dress, rich a luxuriant, it would make a lovely funeral garb, but then someone would ask where this middle-aged white woman got a traditional Chinese wedding dress and face mask that had characters and sandlwood and...really there was only ever going to be one conclusion drawn from that line of questioning. 

So she took out her fabric scissors, their great blades almost as long as the old woman's arm and delicately ran their silver edges along the dress till it fell away from Sue. Then she set herself to removing the mask. A quick muttered word to Guan Yin had the desired effect. 

She collected all her things in her basket and looked back at Sue, naked sagging, sorry Sue. _Dammit_ , she thought, _I do feel bad for this idiot_. She took the scissors back out and made a few choice incisions in Sue's neck and abdomen, and dragged her surprisingly heavy body over to the river. 

She placed sue in the water, sitting up as that was how her body had set itself, and soon something draped a simple robe of green cloth around Sue's shoulders. It took a few seconds before it really happened, the hard bit, when those incisions she'd made breathed open and closed for the first time, and realized they couldn't process air, when Sue flopped around until she smacked face first into water and then realized that she could breathe in this. Before Sue would shoot a great angry splash of water at her for _Saving Her Goddamn Life_ , but never mind, Sue would take her robe, cover up her newly formed gills and paddle off down into the river where she would meet someone. Someone the old woman knew very well, who she hoped would treat Sue well, and whom she hoped sue would serve justly. 

And she would hobble back to her little house, go inside, and try to make herself feel better about what she just did.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now that the opening monologue has been spoken let the stage be set and the players roll out.

Normally the old woman would fall asleep in darkness and wake to it. Normally she would cover herself in shadows, in black clothing and secrecy. Blinds closed, doors locked, maybe even leave little sharp bits of glass on the floor if she was feeling particularly worn from a day of being her. But the night that she set Sue to down to meet her new employer, she had been very worn out indeed, so worn that she simply crawled into her bed and tried as hard as possible to pass out. She had not succeeded, nor had she taken any of her usual cautionary measures. 

So though she went to sleep in darkness, she woke to a room filled with golden light. She groaned and hid her head further beneath the blankets, _Why does the night have to end?_ She thought, before realizing something: she wasn't' sure if she'd locked the doors. She was about to get up and lock the door to her bedroom, which didn't have a lock, so essentially she was about to get up to fumble around her bedroom door for thirty minutes before barricading it with the nightstand, anyways, she was just getting up, just moving her hands out from under her pillows when she realized something. She still had the scissors in hand.

She slowly moved down the staircase, scissors held like a very big hunting knife. She was ready for whoever would dare come into her house. She searched the foyer, the kitchen, living room, and the dining room, then she searched them again, and again. Eventually she came to the conclusion that she was wandering around her house in crumpled clothes that she had gone to sleep in, holding a pair of over sized sewing scissors, and furthermore she decided that the common passerby would deem her completely insane.

She drooped a little at this thought, putting her silver utensils on the dining room table, she slumped off into the kitchen to make herself some coffee. 

Sitting down at the dining table, coffee in hand, she looked at her sun washed living room and decided she wanted to close the curtains again. It wasn't that the place was bad, just that it was old, and it was not aging gracefully; the plaster was cracked, there were holes where glass had been punched out of windows, and despite having never owned any pets the place smelt faintly of cat urine. She sipped her coffee and tried not to throw the mug at the wall. She'd done that on her fortieth and it hadn't been satisfying then, neither had punching out the windows on her fiftieth, or taking a hammer to the wall when she hit sixty. For her mornings were just sitting down and reminding herself that blowing up the house was not a worthwhile endeavor. 

_Well, I mean, I've never blown it up_ , she thought, _might be fun_.

She put her mug down and looked over at the stairs, they lead into the basement, where the furnace was, and the gas line. She looked over to the fridge, on top of which was a bowl of little tools. 

She tried to remember when her next birthday was, _actually how old am I? Oh God did I actually get to the point where Is topped coun--_

**KNOCK!KNOCK!KNOCK!**

_Jesus! I'm coming!_ She thought as she went to answer the front door, not that unusual a practice for her, most of her clients would bang on that infernal thing like their lives depended on her help, which in her experience they rarely did. Usually they just wanted things like that idiot Sue, things that they, in all honesty probably could live without. But ever since the eighties.. _.how long ago were those again? ah never mind_. Ever since the eighties there had been a pretty consistent stream of men and women, usually white, in suits rushing up to pay her thousands upon thousands for dangerous things that might get them something that they, again, could survive without. She was used to opening the door in early light to face a tall man with a hurried face, or a high-heeled woman with an impatient look, or on occasion, the mail man. 

The person at the door today was none of those things.

He was small, maybe three maybe four feet, wearing a baseball uniform, and was, most shockingly of all to her, Asian. The boy, she assumed, based on the uniform and the short black hair, appeared to be holding a baseball bat as if he was about to take another swing at some...she looked at the door and sure enough there were several baseball-bat induced dents in her front door. If she actually liked anything in the house she might have lost her temper, but she supposed, looking at it from the outside the house was for all intents and purposes abandoned, certainly the garden alone belonged more in a Stephen King novel... _who is that again? Nevermind_. Either way she was about to send the little maniac off with a good stern warning and a well-shook, but ultimately empty hand when he started crying. Loudly. 

She had never had children of her own, so she wasn't clear on where one went from here, whiny business people, and deluded nutcases, there was her territory, but tiny humans...she didn't understand. She tried grasping him by the shoulders and shaking him, she'd seen that done in a movie, Airplane...she decided to switch tactics while resenting that she could remember that whole movie, but couldn't remember her age. She tried to coo and croon at him, she tried to think of other things but it was hard to think with all this noise...then she remembered the scissors, she went inside, the kid followed after her, wailing about not calling his mom, she wanted to say she hadn't the faintest idea who his mother was...but by then she had the scissors and with one swift motion his sobs became silent.

It took him a minute to realize it. He stopped sobbing, he tried screaming, to a similar amount of nothing. Then he grabbed his bat, she grabbed her scissors and cut the tip off of it. He gulped. She gestured at the floor, he sat down cross-legged, after a few minutes she leaned in.

"Have you gotten that out of your system yet?"

He nodded.

"Good, now I'm going to let you talk. TALK. Not scream. Not cry. Talk. And I want you to explain to me why you're hitting my door with a baseball bat, not that I care about the door, I just want to know why you felt the need to run into my house crying, okay?"

The boy looked at the floor but nodded. 

She gracefully swung the scissors over his head and watched as he tried to speak again. His first words were "I knew you were home, I'm sorry"

"You knew?" she asked, genuinely shocked, she put hard work into not putting hard work into this steaming pile of a house, how did people know?

"I was hitting your--"

"Yeah, I don't actually care, how did you know I was here?"

"What, but the door--?"

At this she broke her promise and chucked her coffee mug at the main entrance. The boy's eyes went wide. 

"I take care, to not take care of this house, so people don't come in here. How do people know?"

The boy looked like he was about to start crying again. She pulled out the scissors. He gulped and stammered out "m-My mom, s-said you lived here--"

"How did she know?"

"i-I-i..." his eyes welled up this time, and she lowered her scissors, it was occurring to her, for the first time today, that perhaps a small child who goes around with a baseball bat to attack doors, might, just might, not have all the answers.

"I'm going to make tea" she said. Thinking of the jasmine her mother used to give her whenever she was distressed, she looked over at that boy, quivering and shaking in a peewee baseball uniform and decided that he could use some calming down. At least for her sakes.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We take a break and meet the little boy with the bat.

Toby sat in a luxuriant plush chair sipping something hot out of a porcelain cup. And he was terrified. He was sitting in the living room with an old Chinese woman, which wasn't that unusual, it was Sunday, he usually spent at least part of Sunday at his grandmother's house, but this woman was not his grandmother, his plump grandmother wore faded floral dresses, bobbed her grey hair and hobbled around her garden watering the plants for fun. This woman was tall and thin, as if someone had rolled her flat like cookie dough, her clothes weren't faded, they were a solid and unrelenting black, from neck to heel she was covered by a shiny black material, it had been shaped into a shirt and pants that hung loosely off her long thin frame, she wore her long white hair in a great ponytail at the back of her head, and the only thing she seemed to find fun was twirling those little swords, they looked like scissors but Toby couldn't imagine a length of sharp metal that size being anything but a sword.

But she wasn't the bit that scared him, what scared him was that he wasn't supposed to be here. What scared him was what his mother would do or say once she found out he'd been here, and she would find out, she always found out everything. 

So Toby sat there, sipping what he'd been told was tea, though it didn't get served with milk or sugar like his grandmother liked it, and tried not to tell this woman who his mother was. She simply sat there, in a wooden chair twirling her swords, waiting for him to stop cry--for his allergies to calm down. 

He hadn't wanted to come here, he really hadn't, he'd been warned against it a gajillion times, mostly by his mother, she said the old woman was a Coke dealer, why her selling those little red cans made her dangerous Toby would never know, but then again maybe that was what those little swords were made of, maybe there was something dangerous about Coke, maybe the chemicals had helped her do that trick with his voice. 

Toby took another sip. He found his cup was empty, he raised it up and asked for more, she stalked across the room, took his cup and went back into the kitchen. Taking the swords with her. Toby looked back at the front door, could he make it? Could he run that fast? 

No, no he couldn't, being a slow runner was got him into this mess in the first place. He looked down at the reddish-brown dirt stains on his baseball uniform, ran his hands over his knees, he really wasn't a fast runner, he didn't know what his teammates had expected, he was nine, how athletic were they expecting him to be? But no matter how often he insisted on staying on bench they always put him out there, the hot sun beating down, the stink of dirt and sweat and dog poop, and the feel of a bat in his hands. And he hated it, the whole thing. 

That's not to say he couldn't hit a ball, he could, in fact if there was one thing he was good at it was hitting the ball, he just couldn't run fast enough to give them a home run. 

And for his teammates that was reason enough to be snotty to him. Their blue and green eyes glaring at him, even off the pitch, because his parents had had the brilliant idea to enroll him in the school team, maybe they'd hoped he'd make friends, in fact they often told him to hang out with those lobsters after practice. And he did. Or he tried. But his ineptitude at running was too crucial a sticking point for them to ever appreciate him. 

That was until he'd discovered their other favorite game; truth or dare. He saw them playing it from time to time, usually the boys would pick dare because at the tender age of nine one had to carefully guard his secrets; no one wanted their crush to _know_ that they liked them. They usually had to do something stupid or embarrassing but nothing painful, so Toby, after ages (two weeks) of asking was allowed to play one game. 

And he suspected that they only let him play because he'd make an easy punching bag, but if his parents sent him off to another barbecue where no one would talk to him he was going to throw himself onto the coals, so he played, and they picked him, and dared him to go over and kiss a girl. And he did. And she smacked him. And then it was his turn.

They were shocked, they hadn't expected him to _actually_ do that. It was a _girl_. How did he do that? How was it so easy? He'd wanted to say that he got slapped so clearly it wasn't that easy, but he'd just kept quiet, smiled a knowing smile, and proceeded with the game. And from then on he was always asked to play, because he was good at it, every girl-related dare was easy, every public humiliation temporary, every teacher-based insult got him more points with the rest of the class. He didn't see a downside. Neither did his parents who were overjoyed at the sudden arrival of male friends, living, breathing proof of their normal offspring. They never got calls from school because he went home early and answered them, always giving the school false times for his parents arrival. 

And up until today there had been no problems. 

But someone had dared him, and he never backed down from a dare, maybe he'd been brave, maybe he'd been stupid, maybe he'd thought that he'd outsmarted his mother thus far, perhaps he could outsmart her ghost stories too. But now he saw the truth, he couldn't outsmart her, this woman, whatever she was, was going to tell his mother, his mother was going to hound him as to why he came here, and it was all going to come out. And as always his mother would know everything. 

When the old woman came back with his tea she eyed his face, trying to see if he had stopped...having his allergies. That was it. 

She tilted the swords under his chin and said in a voice that struck him as alarmingly warm and soft from someone so sharp-looking "Sorry about this"

And like that she made a quick jerking motion with the scissors as if snipping a thread under his chin and above his collar bone, his vision went white, then blue, then he heard something, something very high-pitched and squeaky, he felt something move, and realized only too late that it was his mouth. He was talking... _Is that really what sound like?_ ,he thought, he could only tell the tone and pitch of the voice, but he couldn't quite make out the words, but he could tell from the old woman's face that he was sharing some very crucial things, she nodded along, raised her eyebrows and some parts, frowned at others, rolled her eyes frequently and by the end of it was looking at him. Just looking at him, her eyebrows bent in a way he wasn't used to seeing, out of anyone, expect for his father after he'd gotten a bloody nose from a stray baseball, he'd sat with him, held ice to his nose and tried to make it better. That look had never left his face, and now it was plastered all over the face of the old woman. 

Sympathy he'd heard it called. 

The look didn't last long though, soon there came an angry knocking on the door, and a very familiar-sounding shouting. His mother was here. The old woman saw his face, got up, and answered the door. Toby didn't hear much of what happened, only his mother screaming partly at the woman who still held her sword, largely at him, now deprived of his bat. But Toby did see the small army of his baseball team huddled behind his mother, some of them with their parents, most of them also having "allergies", none of them looked happy, in fact all of the parents looked angry. 

His mother was still railing when the old woman stepped outside, closed the door behind her and didn't come back in for what felt like centuries but was really ten minutes. When she came back in, he saw his mother's face, she wasn't angry anymore, she looked,for the first time in his life like she didn't know everything. The other parents still looked mad but they weren't staring up at the house anymore they were shaking fingers and getting red...well more red in the face at their sons, who were increasing their own redness from "allergies". When the old woman returned, she knelt in front of Toby and whispered in his ear

"Come back here next Saturday, bring hedge trimmers"


End file.
